Beware of Land Mines!
What Happens In The Land Of The Survivalists?
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About a month and a half ago, I started to become interested in the micro cultures of the Modern Survivalist Movement in America. It all started with an article about James Wesley, Rawles that I saw on Twitter: “How big Christian nationalism has come courting in North Idaho” . In this article they talked about the intersection of christianity and nationalism that has become the hallmark of the modern survivalist movement in America. A movement that is very distinct from the classic survivalist movement of the Cold War where one built a nuclear fallout shelter to protect the American wave of life including a future American Democracy.
The modern American Survivalist Movement is hostile to the present day America. Whereas the Cold War era survivalists were trying to preserve the basic elements of American Culture and Society in their bomb shelters. Modern Day survivalists have more in common with separatists movements instead. Whereas their intellectual forefathers had a clear cut singular enemy the CCCP; the modern survivalist is not afforded that same luxury. Instead the movement is now embroiled in the murky elements of conspiracy theories that have so completely come to dominate the democratic nature of the internet’s information dissemination process. On the internet a conspiracy about lizard people by David Icke can be given the same weight and force as a true conspiracy about the CIA’s MKUltra program in the 1950’s. This process of democratization of all sources of information has, to quote Francois Lyotard, destroyed the “meta-narratives” that hold a culture together. In short the ability to trust has been so eroded by the overload of information that all sources of information are now considered equal. The once trusted narratives that held together our culture have been usurped by inferior narratives. This situation has created a fracturing of the populations’ ability to trust not only sources of new information based on experts, but also canonical information as well. We are literally living in a nation where a large portion of the population are only confirming their own information bias with these inferior narratives that are now making our culture divided.
To understand this world view better I started a few accounts [4] at a website called Survivalist-Singles.com. It was billed as a site that was more than a dating site, but an open community for survivalists and critical thinkers . And it was that I guess, until my little social experiment changed that aspect of the website and community. Now, it’s a private community for Critical Thinkers— that is a big part of the Survivalist’ persona that they aren’t part of the pack. [The male members of the Community like to throw around the term Sigma Male. I don’t know if there is a Sigma Female to correspond to this.] They’re awake to the reality of the conspiracies. The website was billed as a location for meeting each other. However, most of the topics were simply about the various conspiracies each poster believed in. The poster HockyJock1 spent a significant amount of time discussing how George Soros was responsible for everything from the January 6th Riot to Trump’s latest legal trouble. Other posters like Judy essentially just didn’t like paying taxes. Other posters pushed chem-trail conspiracies , anti-vaccine conspiracies, and finally the Great Reset conspiracies. Even Jimmy Dore was represented in this community. Not as much as more extreme content creators about the imminent failure of the dollar or how the Federal Reserve was going to steal the entire monetary system. One Poster that seemed to deal in every type of conspiracy was AKoffgrid and he was also the most confrontational of them all.
Perhaps, the serious matchmaking was going on between people with private messages. But, it is hard to believe that a group of people that are so obsessed over their privacy would ever dare to reach out to see each other in real life. The owner talked about her love of free speech but that was far more theoretical than actually practiced in reality in the end.
I have to state that my idea was simple, push the limits of what this community could accept. To do this I created a series of personas: 1) Koos De La Ray was my Anarcho-Syndicalist persona named after the famous Second Anglo-Boer War Commando that was a bitter ender; 2) Jim Wolrich a right wing ladies man that used a picture of a 1970’s lamb chopped Issac Asimov as his avatar and was like Trump on Steroids; and 3) Chuckwagon Bob that took over that persona after the original sexist pig was deleted. The other characters I created to watch the responses after users blocked me. The idea was simply to push the boundaries not with anything super provocative at first. Just merely an attempt to see how much these people followed in the footsteps of James Wesley, Rawles (yes, the comma goes in the name because Mr. Rawles feels that the normal naming conventions of our English language are not capable of properly conveying the fact that his surname is Rawles and his given names are James and Wesley. This is completely true. For some odd reason everyone time I think of his name I think of Wile E. Coyote, Super Genius…) about his concept of the Redoubt, that is as much about creating religious separation as it is about economic and political separation these groups also seek:
“I’m sure that this brief essay will generate plenty of hate mail, and people will brand me as a religious separatist. So be it. I am a separatist, but on religious lines, not racial ones. I have made it abundantly clear throughout the course of my writings that I am an anti-racist. Christians of all races are welcome to be my neighbors. I also welcome Orthodox Jews and Messianic Jews, because we share the same moral framework.” Redoubt (Rawles)
This fits right into the overall American attitude. The idea that America is somehow a chosen nation as God’s Democracy isn’t lost on these types of individuals. And it is why I wanted to see what exactly they would be discussing as survivalist singles. And this passage explains the general ideological need for the survivalists’ to cloister themselves (a term that even Rawles uses himself in the article to explain the process that must occur) to prevent their groups from becoming ideological impure.
Rawles writes in his article titled Precepts “Associate yourself with skilled doers, not “talkers.” Seek out people that share your outlook and morality. Living in close confines with other families is sure to cause friction but that will be minimized if you share a common religion and norms of behavior. “ And the site Survivalist Singles (promoted on Rawles’ own website Survival Blog) does essentially the same for these people. It is a safe space that I came to invade with radical ideas like egalitarianism, wealth equality, and respecting differences. Things that are not part of the Modern Survivalist Program.
In a very short time the friction began to mount. I was essentially expressing the antithesis of the values of the community at heart. While the Survivalist-Singles community craves connection as all social beings do—they are also deeply afraid of the community becoming tainted with alien ideas that promote things like mutual aid and the ownership of things communally. These types of oppositional ideas are often seen as direct attacks on the members. Once you start to oppose their ideas you are a bully. And I preferred to tackle bad ideas head on and this caused massive friction by declaring their conspiracies false. So, clearly I want to see the fruit of my labor now as well. These reactions are mild considering the past reactions.
As I was doing a bit of reconnaissance using a still active undercover account– a poster declared that my project must have been from the Feds after reading my first draft that the site owner Brattani posted.
Which only points to the intersection of the alt-right and alt- left wing’s growing paranoia about being part of some new-COINTEL PRO program. I only wish I could answer him with something that would keep him guessing a bit. But, I don't want to give up what few windows of insight I have left on this community just yet. So, for now I will keep my fingers off the keyboard while scrolling up and down the feed on the website.
The truly bizarre thing is that Brittani the owner[now calling herself Im_Your_Huckle _Bearer] of the website declared she didn’t want to read my finished article or even go on the podcast when I asked to explain her positions. Instead when I noted I had more twitter users - someone[I believe the owner] denied it, and then deleted the Twitter Account immediately. I know for a fact a twitter account was associated with this site because I posted a comment on a video of hers from my podcast account about the number of off grid people with internet access. All of this is the least rational responses I've ever encountered for someone who wants to create a free and open community that is capable of growth. But so many things are paradoxical about the Modern Survivalist Movement to me.
This was our penultimate communication I had with her or any of her staff until I sent her a link to a first draft of the article for her comments. Instead of giving me comments Brittani decided to post the entire article to her website instead.
So, clearly she wanted her audience to read it. Something I did too. But, not a rough draft—I guess we cannot always get what we want. So, you can see how I was a bit perplexed to see her do this. I figured I would have to sacrifice a pawn for the cause to see what the community's reaction would be to the article. Thankfully, Brittani has saved me that option. The funny think about the owner of the site is that the owner who once claimed it was a free community of critical thinkers. However, now it is a completely cloistered the community behind an approval wall (which is unlikely to admit many in the next few months for fear of the anti-Survivalist Scourge to return like Hannibal knocking on Rome’s Gates), placed a no-screenshot clause for the members but oddly forgot to disable the share button on each post, and finally has increased the number of moderators to Four.
What is ironic is that with the least bit of concentrated pressure the survivalist community has turned into a police state to secure its privacy supposedly. Which of course should make anyone of these libertarians question the nature of this community? But, I guess free speech really does look like this in the end when you have no real commitment to it!
Free Ideas are a very popular concept to people in these subcultures until they are in direct opposition to their own values. AKoffgrid above called me a “thief”, “socialist”, and “Anti-Freedom” for proposing a commune system in my first few posts. My general discourse at first was simply about the weaknesses I felt certain survivalists showed in their socioeconomic modeling. So, I would post about creating a large-scale anarcho-syndicalist community model to counter a large- scale paramilitary organization and the community would claim that this cannot work. Or another example of me posting looks like this pretty innocuous comment on this BlueMountainMan’s first message about creating a community.
Here is a perfect example of the discourse on the site. I asked a question and started to flesh out issues with it. In response I’m an “Analytical prick that struggles to pull a stick out of his own ass every day”. Not exactly the response a rational person would give. Eventually, I pushed this to the limit by questioning his Sigma Male status and the poster sent me death threats. But these weren’t the first threats of violence I received on this website.
The user AKoffgrid is a fan of posting memes mostly. However, he will post the occasional video as well. In one such posting by this user he posted an anti-trans video. I felt that this was the perfect time to step it up a bit. To see what would occur if I attacked him for being a transphobe. So, I decided to ask him if was looking for a pegging. I knew this would enrage him. But, I felt it fair since this poster has made numerous comments about Transgendered people. Including many comments about former First Lady Michelle Obama being a man. [I don’t have any particular feelings about Michelle Obama one way or the other, I just think if you’re going to mock someone repeatedly for being a Transperson who isn’t you should stand to suffer a similar fate.] So, I thought it wasn’t out of line to give a little of what AKoffgrid was dishing out continuously on the site. I have to say, I was expecting to be blocked first. But, instead this user went straight to the threat of personal violence. And then made the threat at least 3 more times concluding with this statement where he makes a direct threat to my person and when reported nothing was done.
Considering the website’s policy is that threats of violence not just death but violence are against their user policy. We can see a vicious double standard. AKoffgrid wasn’t censured for his clear violation of the policy that no threats of violence are allowed.
AKoff Grid also continually made comments about Transpeople including posts with the dead body of the Tennessee shooter placed in ritualist killings like this stoning which tends to send a message that is not only anti-trans but glorifying the death of these people as a communal act of cleansing the evil from the society. This is the type of free speech that is not only made but supported by the other posters.
After our interaction AKoffgrid continued to push anti-trans phobia. Now, I’m not claiming that the Tennessee Shooting that recently occurred wasn’t a tragedy. However, the idea that we should mock the death of the shooter as being part of a ritualistic stoning as the first meme indicates is hate speech to me. And is far more hateful than saying someone might enjoy a good pegging. It also shows that deep within this community is a seething hatred to all things they deem alien or foreign in nature to their own subculture. Posters routinely liked the anti-trans memes that AKoffgrid seems to have an endless supply of .
It’s strange that no one else seemed to believe that placing Michelle Obama in the role of a trans-man would be an attack on black women being more manly and less feminine than their white counterparts. The only thing missing here is the image of Melina Trump to compare Michelle too. I was expecting to see this type of image but never did find one:
Instead AKoffgrid once again gave me the perfect example with the below image. Ironically, one of the few black female posters Kayli tries to confront the original poster about the magiliging of Michelle Obama but, the attempt is thwarted. AKoffgrid just ignores these comments and speaks of his nordic heritage which is vaguely in the same vein as the Nazis Aryan BloodLine Mythology.
But, make no mistake, the fact that they see a black woman as being a manly figure is a form of dehumanization of Michelle Obama and a way to degrade Barack Obama’s status as a man in their hyper-masculine subculture as well. But, those weren’t the only racist attacks on public figures.
A popular topic on the website was also the discussion of George Soros. According to the poster HockeyJock1 Soros was a liberal subversive undermining the entire Conservative world with his evil plots. The above image is from Nazis Germany depicting the Jewish Greed and connections to the Bolshevik’s of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union. The great myth at the time was that the Jews were taking all of the hard workers' freedom and money to enslave them in a communist state that would benefit the Jews.
As you can see the arguments are essentially the same as the Nazis’ made about the Jews back in the 1920’s as they were growing their movement. Their grievance mythology was designed to place the blame for everything on one specific group of people—the jews essentially. And today that would seem unthinkable—but in reality George Soros is the type-token relationship for an entire race of people that is brandished about by rightwing conspiracy theorists in a vain attempt to seem like they aren’t actually racists. The problem is the dog whistle’s pitch isn't that high and everyone can hear the trumpet of hatred like those of Leni Reifenstahl’s masterpiece of Nazis Propaganda Triumph of Will.
[Clearly, Reifenstahl was a master filmmaker, but unfortunately all of her talent was wasted on creating Nazis propaganda that she herself was no doubt also a staunch believer in. And while we can be in awe of her prowess with the camera; we must not forget that she was a dyed in the wool Nazis with all that goes along with Nazism. So, there really cannot be any rehabilitation of her. ] George Soros Memes have become the greatest tool for people like HockeyJock1 to use to spread these destructive antisemitic concepts with a false confidence that only their audience will understand that these memes are pushing the classic Evil Jewish Boogeyman that so many Conservative Christians need to justify they failures and hatreds.
There are plenty of things to dislike about Soros, but calling him a spreader of communism or pretending that he is not part of the Neo-liberal economic system are just fantastic dreams of the modern day white supremacist looking for a dog whistle to safely cover their grievance mythology of the evil Jew that they can use in public discourse.
When I pushed HockeyJock1 for evidence of Soro’s meddling in the Trump case I was given two pieces of evidence: one the insider trading case that the French courts convicted Soros of in 1988 and upheld in 2002; and two, a heritage foundation white paper on Soros’ funding a Boston DA. HockeyJocky1 later produced more evidence in the form of an article citing mostly Heritage Foundation backed research on Soros’ evil deeds—the same deeds the Koch Brothers and their billionaire cronies have been doing since the Powell Memo. To that HockeyJock1 responded with the following statement:
Of course to believe this statement you would have to forget that US involvement in every war starting with the 1898's Spanish American War and ending with Current War on Terror. Billionaires are the class of warfare in most respects. They are ones that benefit the most from the wars in their material contracts. They are also the ones that benefit from the paranoia generated that maintains the nation-state system. The endless competition for the finite resources of our planet and the ability to exploit them is critical, the constant jockeying for position on the world stage that has led to millions of deaths. Right-Wing billionaires like Elon Musk that recently told the world they would Coup whoever they wanted to. This statement by Elon musk is really no different than the Coup engineered by the Doles to conqueror the once independent Hawaii , the death squads that Coca-Cola bottlers employed in Colombia to prevent labor unions, or the myriad of military actions in the Caribbean and Central America during the Banana Wars that was later denounced by Gen. Smedley Butler of the USMC in the 1930’s in his Famous Speech and Short Book “War is a Racket”.
But to admit this reality would be to fundamentally taint the world view of the modern survivalist. A world view that is both myopic and color blind even though those that profess to be truly awakened to the horrors of the modern world choose only to see a small sliver of reality. Their supposed macro-sensibilities of the world usually tend to only be micro-sensibilities based on their feelings of being slighted by the greater world. In a metaphor first proposed by the author [Sociologist] of Strangers In Their Own Land Arlie Russell Houchschild describes the process of alienation of the Right Wing as being likened to a long line and feeling as if others have bypassed those who are rightfully standing in line to get ahead. I would take this metaphor a step further and say that the modern survivalist movement doesn’t only feel that they’ve been by-passed in the line—that the system itself has been completely usurped to serve only the least deserving, the people who haven’t contributed to the greater good, they feel their hard work has been stolen from them countless times, and now they wish to see the system fail. Posters like HockeyJokey1 who also wants to do violence to me for suggesting his conspiracy theories about Soros are in fact antisemitic— does not see that because in his world view the conspiracy against WHITE CHRISTIAN CONSERVATIVES IS REAL. Every day he and his fellow survivalist play by the rules and every day some liberal changes the rules to suit those who are undeserving and unfit to be an American. The billionaires like Trump are their only way of somewhat returning the equilibrium of the system back to fairness in their world view. However that equilibrium as Houchschild explains is not one of equity or equality!
Houchschild rightly points out the systemic racism, cultural destruction of minorities, and exploitation is not considered important to those on the right-wing of the electoral political spectrum . What is considered important is the idea that these minorities are taking something away from those who were supposed to be first in line. The fact that line was skewed to support white-christians first is immaterial to the right-wing of the political spectrum and absolutely ignored by the average survivalist. Instead the important part is that somehow survivalists have exited Plato’s Cave and are now clearly seeing that the injustices are not a racist socioeconomic and political system that has kept minorities and the poor powerless since the colonization of this nation. No, the problem is that the evil and vile concepts of equality, tolerance, equity among all people are thriving—usually in the form of Socialism.
Socialism is theft to them. In my first attempts as the character Koos De La Ray I started to talk about the idea of creating an anarcho-syndicalist type commune like that of the Spanish Civil War. The results as stated weren’t positive. The idea that people could work together in a nonhierarchical model seemed alien to the survivalists. They kept on calling me a “Communist” or “Thief” as if these were the worst possible things they could imagine to use against me and my ideas (All of which were scrubbed from the website when the character was deleted). But the theme was the same over and over again—the survivalists didn’t want to believe in a society that was about mutual aid and egalitarianism. As the poster Judy put it:
Judy’s a classic libertarian full of ideas like removing the government from creating public schools , welfare support, while gladly supporting the gold standard. Judy’s solution to everything is the same solution all good libertarians love: Privatization! Like Milton Friedman before her Judy sees the commons not as a valued collective asset but as liability to the nation. That only once the commons is sold off as nice neat parcels can the society prosper—never once was Judy able to grasp the horror of the privatization schemes that she so championed. Judy blocked me about two weeks into the process when I was trying to explain to her that privatization was not the panacea the billionaire class has sold to the world it would be. As I repeatedly tried to explain to her the differences between a currency issuer and currency user and how the gold standard was only going to make her life more miserable she blocked me. But I will leave you with this final thought form Judy:
In a nutshell the entire revolt of Judy’s is about paying taxes to those who she feels didn’t earn it. And no matter what I said she couldn’t understand that she herself had been a recipient of years of taxes dollars making her quality of life better: public roads, public education that provided the people that could maintain society, public access to water, air, and land, and even the public projects that would become the internet etc. so on. Like HockeyJock1 before Judy couldn’t fathom a world without the good Conservative Billionaires developing the mechanisms of progress.
Never once did it occur to these libertarians that the only reason the car and the truck could compete with the train was because the costly infrastructure of the roads, bridges, and traffic signaling systems were done on the public dime. These good Conservative Billionaires to the Survivalist were the glue that held the entire system together—they were the forces of righteousness that upheld the true nature of America to quote Pres.Coolidge “...Is Business”, harking back to the founding of the country as a colonial possession of England, designed to exploit both human and natural resources for the profit of the aristocracy and the Crown. In some strange way the modern survivalist that pretends that all governments are corrupt and all big businesses are corrupt find themselves in these oddly feudal like state where they are willing to become the vassal of Conservative Billionaires who would more than willingly enslave them to the very corporations they claim to despise so much. This is why Trump can be their idol while also paradoxically being the embodiment of their greatest evil, the absolute monarch that controls their lives from start to finish.
As time progressed during my journey into the online world of the survivalist I noticed that merely questioning the world view was enough to justify the thin veneer of pleasantry to disappear and outright hostility to replace it. A poster that goes by the name SigmaMale took a great dislike to me for questioning his understanding of legal matters.
In this post SigmaMale tries to create some nonsensical statement about how statutes aren’t laws— when I pointed out that Harvard Law disagrees with him on statutes not being law he declared that Harvard Law was full of communists. A post I didn’t save because I didn’t believe it would be deleted. But, it was when all of my posts were purged to cleanse the environment of any reminder that once someone was there that had ideas that went part of their mainstream. These ideas included such things as the fact that Statues are in fact legal laws. This poster has also generated a great deal of posts about fringe conspiracies such as Chemtrails— you might look up in the sky on a sunny day and see the condensed water molecules and particulate matter from the combustion process of a Jet and think Contrails! But, to those on the extreme right those are usually signs of the government poisoning you and our planet with Chemtrails. You know something is wrong when a fringe theory like this becomes so big that Scientific America feels they have to do a story on it with an article in 2018 entitled “What Are Chemtrails Made Of”.
I tried hard to reason with him showing him that even during WWII contrails were present during all high altitude flights even those prior to this Chemtrail nonsense. Like the below photograph of WWII B-17 Bombers on a mission over Europe.
Of course this was dismissed as my stupidity.
The funny thing is that combustion isn’t all that different in a Jet Engine or a Piston Engine from the 1940’s. And the more efficient Jet Engines of today leave less particulate matter in their exhaust than the 1940’s Wright 1820 Cyclones of a B-17 at 25,000ft. This was all lost on SigmaMale that feels that clearly your transcontinental flight from LA to NYC is the perfect time for a nefarious plot to spray mind alternating chemicals, atmospheric alternating chemicals, or some type of chemical to control the population across the country to enslave the people. And it’s true these contrails are full of chemicals like unburnt kerosene from the Jet-A fuel that most of our commercial flights use, dust particles in the atmosphere, and water vapor from both from the combustion process and the atmosphere itself. And Kerosene will contain other contaminants that are related to the fuel and its refining process.
The problem isn’t that chemtrails exist, they do because everything on the planet is made up of chemicals from the water we drink to the air we breathe. The issue is what types of chemicals and what are they doing? And there just isn’t any good evidence for a world wide plot using jet-airlines as a distribution method of some nefarious chemical in the exhaust. But, I’m just a dipshit, don't believe me. The Survivalists have seen the light from sources like Alex Jones to quacks on TikTok telling them Chemtrails are real. Another favorite conspiracy is “The Great Reset”.
The poster that goes by the screen name of Ripper is a fascinating mix of things to be sure. You may have noticed the little green circle with the white check in it by his name signifying his role as the moderator of the site. In fact he is one of four. [ In a truly interesting twist of fate one day after I sent this article to the owner Brittani for commenting, she or the moderation team made AKoffgrid a Moderator. Yes, the same person that has posted transphobic memes, racist memes ( stated even by other members of the community), and threatened me with bodily harm. In what only can be best described as elevating bad behavior to protect the flock from the evil of outside ideas.] Ripper’s interactions are strange. He likes to present himself as the welcome wagon to the community. Part of his shtick is to welcome all the people when they sign up to a group in the community. In that respect the website is different from just a message board. However, most people seem to use this site like a messageboard . It is full of these groups that you have to join to really interact—they have everything from holistic homesteading to the Polyamory Group that I created(well to be honest I created all the catchy named ones about Six). And Ripper loves the attention that he gets from greeting everyone like an overactive host at a restaurant. However, there is an edge to him, something that came out later in his comments to me over any innocuous thing I thought. But, let’s start with one of his favorite conspiracy theories, the “Great Reset”.
It has become a pretty popular part of the Pandemic mythology from the lite-right to the hardcore survivalists. It has been pushed by more mainstream accounts on twitter and YouTube like Kim Iversen and Jimmy Dore but also by Alex Jones and those riding the coattails of Jones as well. For those that don’t know the conspiracy started in 2020 when Klaus Schwab gave a speech at the World Economic Forum about how companies and the economy should progress in the future in a post pandemic world. If this was just another meaningless PR stunt by the World Economic Forum to present the consumption based society as being the righteous path forward to the Utopian of our dreams—I’m sure that would have been ignored. Instead, Schwab decided to describe the pandemic as an event that would allow the follow:
"The pandemic represents a rare but narrow window of opportunity to reflect, reimagine, and reset our world to create a healthier, more equitable, and more prosperous future." (Klaus Schwab)
Of course this seems a bit odd from this group of people , but, much like Richard II of England 600 plus years earlier, the peasants in 2020 were becoming restless and the calls for equality needed to be addressed even if only superficially. The plan called for things like a “wealth tax” and the end of “fossil fuel subsidization”. Things that most people on the left have for more than a decade now championed. But, the plan was vague and of course when you have ambiguous plans by a group of elite business people you have the fertile ground for conspiracy theories to rise up. And this was no different.
Of course no one thinks that a group of self-appointed billionaires making the rules for society without any oversight by the rest of the population is a good idea. And yet, oddly, that is exactly what the Libertarian economic model creates with its hierarchical distribution of power in favor of those with capital (why else would Billionaires like the Koch Brothers love it?). I found it fascinating in my talk with Gene Epstein on the podcast he continually referred to the “tyranny of the 51 percent” meaning the idea that voting enslaved the minority to the majority and thus should be avoided. As you read the survivalists posts you realize that over and over they aren’t as opposed to the tyranny of the minority over that of the majority as they claim they are. They are perfectly happy in a world where people like Elon Musk and The Koch Brothers control the entire planet—what they dislike is the idea of equity and equality. The fear for them in the Great Reset isn’t that a small minority of people controlling the planet exactly. It’s the idea that anyone would want them to give up their ideas on private property, ownership, and control.
Like Judy and others Ripper wasn’t afraid of the Great Reset because of the minority of people controlling the majority of the world’s affairs. No, what they really fear is the idea that you cannot carve out a small fiefdom for yourself. That’s the real horror for the survivalist in any world, the idea of the Commons.
This would all turn out to be rather ironic since at the same time Ripper was angry at me for even suggesting that his “survivalist paradise plan” would require a series of shell corporations both onshore and offshore to successfully hide his ownership of his retreat. His response was one of outrage immediately as if I had mocked him for being stupid (something I would actually do later out of frustration).
I then attempted to tell him how to actually achieve his goal while keeping his anonymity intact. It however degraded fast and I finally asked him if he spent a good part of his time eating any good books because clearly he didn’t read them. So, you see they don’t really care about who owns the rest of the country or the resources just as long they believe their resources are completely owned by themselves. It is a dreadfully microscopic view of the problems that face them. Holed up in these retreats isolated from all people and interactions they believe they can weather out a major storm. The question of why he didn’t just run off to this undisclosed natural habitat is still unclear to me. But I would later find out that his former residence and all of his gear was lost when his home was taken:
The details are unclear for sure , but a reasonable conjecture seems that the home was sold, probably for taxes, but that I cannot be sure of . However, it would make the most sense; since it would be impossible to legally change a title without a death certificate by a son. And if Ripper were living in the house at the time it would seem that he should have been easily able to prove his residence and ownership. So, I believe this is the reason Ripper is sensitive to idea of ownership now. But which is odd, since he wants to basically claim land that isn’t owned in his opinion. The only problem with this is as I explained to him unclaimed land (which there isn’t much of) is in fact public property i.e. owned by the government. So, his great retreat idea is nothing more than squatting on government land. This has all the earmarks of the Bundy Incident in Nevada and Oregon in the mid 2010’s. I am sure that Cliven Bundy is in fact a hero of Ripper for defying the Bureau of Land Management and using federal land without paying the grazing fees. Because Ripper’s plan is much the same stake out a piece of land off the grid and pretend that you own it.
Of course Ripper’s many potential problems are: what happens if the local water sources are dammed up or diverted to water crops; what if the state sells the land to a developer for condos; or, what if the state decides to release wolves and other predators? It’s not exactly possible for the Old Ripper to fight these things in court! He would be just branded a domestic terrorist if tries to protect his castle violently and carted off to jail with all of this precious survivalist gear stored in evidence.
Of course you might be asking yourself why is it that Ripper just didn’t run off to this undisclosed location during the pandemic to set up shop? That is a good question, one that only he knows and will never answer me at least about it now. Of course for Ripper the Pandemic was just another Conspiracy.
Finally, three of my accounts were hacked. The primary account Koos De La Ray , ChuckWagonBob, and JoeThompson. The above avatar was used to mock me on all three accounts and the password changed as well. The owner of the website Brittani claimed it didn’t occur and after I proved it did with the change of password statements that I never submitted for the response was the following:
The hacking annoyed me greatly. And while I didn’t use my real email address or compromise myself—the fact that the site was compromised was still troubling. But, what was truly troubling was that owner failed to even care about it and instead insisted that I wasn’t hacked repeatedly. That to me shows a serious problem with sites ideas of providing safe environment for the users. Of course the reason I was hacked is simple— I was annoying them. The question is who could have done it? My, personal theory is that one of the moderators used their ability to reset the password and changed the accounts’ avatars and passwords. Because I was each account when all of sudden they asked me to re-enter their passwords.
As for the harassment they claim I did, that was basically having the audacity of actually being the person to question their narrative of everything is a conspiracy or confronting the blatant racism and transphobia. But remember this is a person that believes in free speech.
So this post by the Jim Wolrich character that was one part Attila the Hun and one Part Leon Phelps (Tim Meadow’s best character I think on SNL) was banned for talking about group sex and the power of the post-cataclysmic orgy as a means to repopulate the world. But racists memes like this are perfectly acceptable in Britanni’s world view:
And this shows the general level of hypocrisy on the website. What I thought was one of my funnier ideas was when I started off the Wolrich character with an ad for selling sperm, some of which might not even be this character’s or even human. (It was homage to my college days, and the Bull Semen that used to be shipped through UPS regularly.)
Clearly, I was mocking the entire survivalist singles scene with this idea of a survivalist selling his sperm . But one less than humorous individual thought I was serious:
I really wanted to see if would be posted on the exchange and to see what would happen but it never did so I create a place for it be posted in a group I constructed called “Live Free Or Die”— it was also the place where I proposed the carpet bombing of Mexico and the Manifest Destiny of the American Empire as a Survivalist Strategy. Which I thought would be more successful; but, all I got was crickets from the posters. For all their talk about American Greatness that they want back it is empty. They don’t seem to understand that a large part of the 1950’s success that the “Make America Great Again” slogan harkens these supporters back to is based on the success of post-WWII era American Imperialism. An Imperialism that these people reject in many ways because it forces the US to interact on the global stage instead of isolating the nation.
As President Macron of France has pointed out, the US demands its allies to be our Vassals; just as The British Empire required their allies to bend their interests to intersect with Great Britain’s. Empires have been doing this same thing since the time of Rome to the present day with less powerful nations being part of their Empire’s sphere of influence. Once a nation is within the sphere of influence they have no choice but accept their state as a vassal.
So, I decided to see what would happen if I pushed these Imperialist concepts in the survivalist community—the only problem is that basically survivalists are separatists. They really couldn’t care much about anything geo-politically unless they think it will mean the end of days:
I questioned his sources and this was the response I received.
DuvOKC made that claim in February and well it’s April and we’re still not days away from a much larger regional conflict in Europe. DuvOKC later blocked me so I couldn’t respond to the absurd notion that Communists and Nazis were ideologically similar. But this was similar in all respects to the propaganda being spread on the site about imminent war or economic collapses. A popular content creator from Canada with a show called Canadian Prepper, it seems to have originally been designed to highlight prepper gear, but now has morphed into this quasi-paranoid news source that was very popular on the site. Many videos from Canadian Prepper declaring imminent danger were circulated on the website. But they all are similar in content with radical claims of how any day now we will be facing the start of the end of days.
But, the funny thing is that all of these dire warnings of imminent destruction lack one thing: a credible geopolitical theory of why it occurs. It is always some murky bit of hodge podge logical reasoning behind these claims. They seem to always have sources that turn out to be conspiracy theorists like David Icke and Alex Jones— Jones who’s been talking about the demons ruling the world literally for the last two decades almost has taken these poor saps for a hell of a ride selling them fake facts and quackery in the form dietary supplements. The reality of most survivalists is that geo-politically speaking they are just Plain Jane 18th century Isolationists. This is why they buy into the fear spread by Jones and his ilk—because when it comes down to the reality of either playing in the big scary world or hiding from it, Survivalists would just love to run and hide from it all. Building a wall for them is the only way to create the national retreat they crave so much. And why my Imperialist talk fell on deaf ears!
In the end the concepts that survivalists pretend to hold so dear such as free speech, free thought, free land, free expression and free people are contingent on the basic principle that those free thoughts, free land, free expression people look , sound, repeat all the same things they themselves believe in. Otherwise it is an attack on their freedoms.
And in the truly libertarian paradox of freedom they actually despise real freedom. For them freedom is a negative concept not a positive concept designed to build communities.
As we can see Judy expresses everything in terms of an Ayn Rand quote—it seems. Rand’s greatest objection to freedom was that it impeded by the Government’s reach to equalize and force others to accept the “implementation” of rights as necessary. One of the interesting aspects of Judy’s thinking is freedom is not an absolute right in this system she pretends to care so much about. In fact it is completely rational to believe in a system of pure libertarian thought that one could legally and willingly enter into a “slave contract” and thus negate freedom—even the great Libertarian Thinker Robert Nozick had to admit this was a function of the libertarian system he created in his book Anarchy , State, and Utopia (1974). And this sort of paradox is something people like Judy and the rest of the survivalists never think of in the mad-dash to secure their property rights against the evil GOVERNMENT!
And another big topic was Pure Blood or unvaxxed. The above example is from moderator Ripper now he might be talking about anti-vaxxed but this pure blood rhetoric [and the unvaxxed community] is also making the rounds on the new-alt right movement called MAGA-Communists started by a Twitter personality and Youtube Content creator Haz and championed by the steroid loving loser below Jackson Hinkle. Hinkle has recently transitioned from wannabe political figure into extreme YouTube pundit with his shift from the Left spectrum to Right-Wing clout chasing wannabe White Power Nationalist. These types of statements about pure blood and blood lines are all echos of the Nazis slogan Blood and Soil.
And the vaccination in these circles is seen as a source of impurity with a recent conspiracy debunked that Pfizer was attempting to place computer chips in people with their vaccines. One cannot help but question is this Pure Blood rhetoric morphing form being just about the Vaccine and being seen as a way to distinguish between the Aryan Pure Bloods and the Muddled Blood of the Vaccinated and racially impure?
While some of the users of this rhetoric might not always be cognizant of the relationships of these statements to Nazis ideology; it is a short trip for them once they’ve entered this phase of their political development to full on Nazism.
In the end you want to give these people the benefit of the doubt— that they aren’t bad people and that is true if they are speaking strictly about them not breaking the law. Most of these people haven’t broken the law or caused civil unrest in that sense. But, that is a very low bar to jump over. When we increase the bar to include issues of systemic racism, sexism , and creating a common good. They tend to fail miserably. They see no reason to address systemic racism and instead prefer to think of it as yet another Liberal cause to force them to feel sorry for the undeserving people of the world. They are more than happy to spread anti-trans bigotry because they don’t feel these people deserve anything but ridicule and scorn essentially. They are more than happy to joke about the death of liberals:
They are easily offended by asking them about their positions. And ultimately when empowered enough through the anonymity of the Internet they are more than willing to make overt threats of violence repeatedly against those they feel have wronged them. They complain about the government and laws only because deep down inside they feel oppressed by the legal system because they wish it didn’t exist. They want a libertarian fantasy where the legal system protects only their property and their desire to exploit others.
And these are sadly the types of people because of their supposed anti-war status leftists like Chris Hedges says we need to join forces with. Hedges writes in this essay titled “There Are Permanent Allies Only, Permanent Power” that:“We will not topple corporate power and the war machine alone. There has to be a left-right coalition, which will include people whose opinions are not only unpalatable but even repugnant, or we will remain marginalized and ineffectual. This is a fact of political life.” The great irony of this statement is that the survivalists who make up a large part of the libertarian thought aren’t about any of this. They are just Isolationists from a geopolitical perspective. The war they crave and they desire so much is actually an internal conflict, one where they remake America into little fiefdoms of power for themselves. Where their fantasies of pure freedom leaves the nation looking as if it were 1840 again. They seek a lifestyle of Henry David Thoreau but, ironically when the pandemic struck they decided instead of running to the hills and making their survivalist fantasies reality, they claimed it was fake and ran to the streets to make sure their comfortable lifestyles wouldn’t be disrupted by reality. They missed their moment. Instead of toppling the system they fought to prop it up with anti-vax mandate protests and rallies to end the government assistance. So, one must ask if they missed out on this pandemic what will happen when something really happens? Are they going to once again pretend it is a fraud or will they act?
It has become apparent that I will not receive any official comments from the website owner Brittani. In fact here is how the management of Survivalist-Singles has responded to me in the latest statement:
So, this is the final message I received from the Owner of the site before publishing. The owner is correct that it does seem a bit odd to not give my substack or my real name out. That is something I do all the time. And yet, after receiving at least two credible death threats from the website users that I know of you can see why I wouldn’t give away myself early. I will send a complete link to site owner once this published to substack today. If she chooses to distribute on the website I leave that up to her. Still, I don’t wish her any ill will or want to see the website removed. I only want to shine a light on the dangers of survivalist mentality that lends itself so readily to adopting a view of the world that is distrustful, vengeful towards perceived wrongs real or imaginary, and the deep-seated grievance mythology that underpins most of their conspiracy theory based ideology.
In the end I feel this is a cautionary tale to the left— embrace mutual aid, trust your neighbors and reach out them in understanding even if they aren’t the same. Try to build communities that are large, multi-cultural and multi-ethnic in nature. Do not cloister yourself within a small demographically limited group and above all never stop learning.
In the end however, I found that general consensus on the website was one of rejection of rough-draft. here is small example of the comments that I gleamed from the website yesterday.
So, I will end this here… as it stands today